In my last post about writing, I talked about how I started the draft of my novel, how I thought I knew what I was doing, and how I found out I was completely wrong. In this post, I’ll talk about how I started fixing the problems I’d created for myself and how I moved forward through the editing process.

This is completely unrelated to my writing, but as I lived in Morioka, Japan (northwest of Sendai) for awhile in college, I am keeping the people of Iwate prefecture in my heart and mind while we wait to see what happens with the potential tsunamis. I still remember getting woken up in the dead of night in 2011 with news of the last major earthquake in that area, one that was one of the costliest disasters in human history, and I am scared for my friends still living in Japan right now.

At least one of my friends in the area has checked in via Facebook. I’ve messaged my host family to see if they’re alright. I’m still waiting to hear from my old roommate who relocated to Japan permanently a few years back. I’ll update this post as I learn more.

I’ve heard from my host family, and they’re all okay. Still waiting to hear from my old roommate. It looks like the tsunami warnings have been lessened, so there’s at least that. I’ve seen some videos of the quake, and it didn’t look good. I’m continuing to hold the people of Iwate close to my heart tonight.

And I’ve finally heard back from my old roommate. She’s fine. Now it’s just a matter of waiting to hear about the damage from the quake.

I will admit that when I started working on my first novel, I really had no idea what I was getting into. I’d written plenty of novella length pieces before, generally between 25-30k words, and I naively assumed that my process for writing those would work for writing a longer form piece. Boy, was I wrong.

Three years ago, I started working on my first novel. As I’m nearing the final steps of that process – though it feels like I’ve still got a long way to go – I’ve decided to start a blog about my writing, my process, and what it’s like to self-publish (or at least what my experience with it is). I don’t know that anyone will gain something from that, but I know it can’t hurt for me to get some of the stress of it off my chest.

I’m not quite sure where to start with this, so let me start with some background about myself and how I got to this point in the first place.